May 10, 2012: Former National Review Columnist: White Supremacism ‘One of the Better Arrangements History Has Come Up With,’ Says Conservatism Will Always Be Dominated by Whites

VDare.com logo. VDare is the new home of racist columnist John Derbyshire. [Source: VDare (.com)]Columnist John Derbyshire, recently fired from his 12-year stint at the National Review after writing an overtly racist screed for another publication (see April 5, 2012, April 5-6, 2012, and April 7, 2012), begins a new stint as a regular columnist for the openly racist, white supremacist blog VDare.com (see November 26, 2004, May 2008, October 18, 2011 and After, and February 9-11, 2012). Derbyshire writes that the more moderate “Chambers of Commerce-financed precincts of Conservatism Inc.” can no longer be trusted to turn America towards real conservatism, and the real home of conservatism is with far-right white supremacists such as the members of VDare. There is a “faint hope,” he writes, “that this other crowd might actually turn us back some way towards liberty, sovereignty, science, constitutionalism.” VDare and other groups are not racists, he says, but “immigration patriots,” though others prefer terms such as “alternative right,” “paleoconservatives,” “Right Opposition,” and others. (Derbyshire also suggests the term “Dissident Right.”) The “enemies of conservatism” prefer terms such as “white supremacist,” he writes, a term “meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.” However, once such “malice” is stripped away, he observes, “I actually think ‘White Supremacist’ is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements history has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group. Even non-whites acknowledge this in unguarded moments… Non-white supremacy is after all the rule over much of the world, from entire continental spaces like sub-Saharan Africa to individual black-run or mestizo-run municipalities in the USA. I see no great floods into these places by refugees desperate to escape the horrors of white supremacy.… In any case, the Whatever Right contains many separatists—who, far from wanting to lord it over nonwhites, just want to get away from them.” Derbyshire says that however accurate the nomenclature, the far-right movement should not embrace the label of “white supremacist,” nor the related “white nationalist.” He goes on to note: “I don’t mind the word ‘white’ in either of those expressions. Conservatism Inc. or otherwise, is a white people’s movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding. Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for 12 years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when [Republican presidential candidate] Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room.… This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and mestizos. Very much the contrary, especially in the case of Conservatism Inc. They fawn over the occasional nonwhite with a puppyish deference that fairly fogs the air with embarrassment.… It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on government have no appeal to underperforming minorities—groups who, in the statistical generality, are short of the attributes that make for group success in a modern commercial nation. Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They would end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of society than they are currently. A much better strategy for them is to ally with as many disaffected white and Asian subgroups as they can (homosexuals, feminists, dead-end labor unions), attain electoral majorities, and institute big redistributionist governments to give them make-work jobs and transfer wealth to them from successful groups. Which is what, very rationally and sensibly, they do. So it’s not the ‘white’ that bothers me. Heck, conservatives might just as well be honest about it, since it’s so almighty bleeding obvious. It’s that ‘supremacy’ and ‘nationalism’ are poor fits for the spectrum of views out here on the To-Be-Determined Right.… What else have we got?” He closes with a suggestion that the broad term “conservatism” applies strictly to the far-right white supremacists of VDare and other such organizations. [John Derbyshire, 5/10/2012] Ian Millhiser of the liberal news Web site Think Progress calls Derbyshire’s column “open… praise” for “a racial caste system.” [Think Progress, 5/14/2012]